The Great Indian Disservice

India is a nation of great ironies.

Forget about the political incongruities, the secular fabric that is fast fraying around the edges and an economic paradigm that is waltzing in the chasm of inequities. These have become boring topics. I am talking about curious things like how you get to spend a night in the cozy company of bed bugs in a second class air conditioned train compartment for a few thousand rupees or how you need to drive around only five kilometers and burn fuel to get a mobile top up card, because shops in your area are closed, thanks to a 48 hour general strike.

Agreed, maintaining Indian Railways, which is one of the largest networks in the world, is no joke. But who is joking here? I mean serious business – the business of having systems in place and giving the tax payer the due he deserves; the business of getting people to do the job they are paid for. Someone suggested the night after we were severely bugged that we must have made a complaint to the ticket examiner. In a country where railway cops push ticketless travelers out from a moving train or evil men transgress openly in a compartment, what can a ticket checker do to fend off swarms of silent bugs and roaches?

There is certainly someone else responsible for providing the public with services that it is paying for and more under him to implement the services efficiently. It ticks me off to see that there is neither the will to serve nor accountability in areas of public service. It is okay to provide dirty blankets in the train, because people take the unclean (w)rap lying down. The news of a rat biting a senior citizen in a railway coach is read with more amusement than alarm, and forgotten. The ‘dry run’ in the toilets continues amid soiled seats and smelly space. We groan, yet go on, because we have no advocates to plead our case.

That people aren’t doing the jobs that they are taking the wages for irks me. I wonder if it is a trend peculiar to India alone. The tendency to shirk work has become so regular that we have now learnt to work our way around it. If the guy at the government office is missing in his seat, we merely wait till he returns from his extended coffee or lunch break. That is the biggest perk of holding a government job. No one can fire you for playing truant.

Again, how does one accept the arrogance of a porter at the station who would rather cool his heels than reduce his wage demand and do the task for his own good? The 48 hour national strike of February might have its supporters for all the purported reasons, but how does one understand the psyche of a people that only needs a whisper about a general strike to go on a self declared holiday, as they did in my home state? Inflation, corruption, minimum wages, economic policies are fair concerns, but to call for a national shut down and to add to the loss of a staggering economic condition hardly makes sense. The irony of it amuses me. The finance minister is at pains to generate national income and his people out there are staying home and celebrating a strike at the cost of over 200 billion rupees. That should be the priciest national holiday ever!

Every time I travel to India, I return with mixed feelings about its prospects. On one hand are the elevated living and excessive spending triggered by private enterprises. On the other hand is the general ennui in the public domain that is hurling the country into a huge, freewheeling space. Alas, service in India doesn’t come even at a cost these days, and the greatest irony is that somewhere we have ourselves to blame for it.